[OSM-talk] The OSM Applet - let's ditch it for JOSM (was: Mapping Reading, some impressions)

[Lars Aronsson]

Tom Carden wrote:

> I don't think at the moment it would hurt OSM one bit if JOSM 
> became an 'official' client and there was no web-based editing 
> solution.

Do you have any statistics to support this view?  Do you know how 
many edits are being made through each channel?  As far as I know, 
the API doesn't provide a way to compile that statistic, except 
for JOSM's bad habit of adding a "created by" attribute.  You can 
count the line segments that don't have JOSM's tag.

I want OSM to be a web project that can be used without installing 
special software.  The fact that the applet requires Java is bad 
enough, but requiring download of Sun's Java and an additional 
edit program would be worse.  It surely means we can have no 
contributors from public computers at libraries or schools.  It 
would be like closing down the project to avoid complaints.

I'm not a GUI programmer and have no experience from the practical 
debugging of an applet, but I have a good understanding of Java 
(as opposed to Ruby).  I certainly could give the applet a try.  
I just got "apache-ant" (as it is called in SuSE 9.1) and got the 
applet running from the command line.  I'm ready to get going.

I suggest a new API component, called "debug":

Client PUT: <osm><debug>I'm Java applet v. 1.2.6</debug></osm>

The server adds the enclosed text to a log file together with a 
timestamp and some internal session ID and responds "200 OK".
I guess <debug> could appear anywhere, next to <node>, <segment> 
and <way>, i.e. piggy-backed on other calls.  Optionally, the 
server could also send a copy of its internal debug messages to 
the client.  The applet would dump this to the Java console, other 
clients might save in a local log file.

  <debug>User indicates own position as 58.4N 15.6E and
         I'm experiencing average response times of
         0.75 seconds for GET node calls,
         3.43 seconds for PUT node calls</debug>

  <debug>The server UPS is failing and will shut down in 120 
         seconds</debug>


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se